There really is a town called Fail in Portugal, apparently. Today, when I went to buy some oranges for breakfast at the local supermarket, I spotted a range of made-in-China toys, featuring what I could only describe as the Fail Police Dept.
The Fail Van:
The Fail Bike:
The Fail roadblock – apparently, toads kill:
Through my years working in technology industries (mostly wireless-related), I have met companies or their local distributors and sales representatives that have shown from outright incompetence, to abuse of their position in the food chain, to slow response from support staff. In all cases, I ended up writing to the CEO, or the highest-ranking officer available, and got a positive outcome. Here are the most relevant cases:
1999 – Garmin GPS
In the late 90s, I was running a small startup that designed and manufactured vehicle tracking and wireless data systems. For one project, we chose a small OEM module manufactured by Garmin, the GPS 35, which integrated a GPS receiver and patch antenna in a waterproof enclosure, with a cable coming out that fed it power and output NMEA data.
The project required 400 of these, and after contacting Garmin Europe, I was directed to their only distributor in Spain for land GPS products. The project cost was based on Garmin’s list price for the module, and we expected to get a volume discount from the distributor. Instead, we got twice the list price, with no discount – this totally blew our project out of our costumer’s budget.
Discussions with the distributor led nowhere, and after some pushing and pulling, I wrote to the head of Garmin Europe, explaining the situation and how upset I was with their representatives and their attitude, which was basically an abuse of their dominant position. The next day a fax arrived from Garmin, stating that while the Spanish market was too small for them, and didn’t warrant more than one distributor, they had contacted the distributor about the matter. An hour later, a fax arrived from the distributor, with a new offer at the official list price minus a 10% volume discount!
Wwe didn’t want to work with the distributor or Garmin in this case as the discussions had gone over the cliff before they reacted, and ordered instead the first units out of Pharos‘ production line – and they were very happy to give us a really good price. While not as durable as the Garmin unit, the Pharos iGPS-180 worked really well.
2006 – Digi
Shortly after we started Whisher, we toyed with the idea of making a wireless device – cannot give more details as this may some day be made, as the idea is very cool. In order to make a proof-of-concept for an investor, we needed to get our hands on some OEM WiFi modules that could be controlled over a serial port by a microcontroller, and we chose Digi’s Connect Wi-SP. Again, we contacted the local distributor to order two units, this being a Tuesday, and since they had them in stock, we asked for the modules to be delivered no later than Thursday, so that I could assemble the prototype over the weekend in time for our meeting with the investor on Monday.
Alas, I called the distributor on Wednesday to ask if the units had been shipped – and they had not, for various obviously fake reasons (leaves on the track, UK readers!). The sales rep stopped responding to my calls, and I feared we wouldn’t get the modules on time. Looking around Digi’s management page, I found the name of the CEO, Joseph T. Dunsmore, and attempted to shoot a blind email to the most likely email – having an earlier email from someone in the tech support department, I guessed the address structure would be the same. And it worked! A couple of hours later, I received a reply, and first thing Friday morning, a call from the sales rep – saying he was bringing the modules into our office personally! Contrary to Garmin, who were very dismissive of our tiny little market, Digi was very helpful, responsive and caring about a small sale, which could or could not turn into something bigger. When you treat your smallest customer as if he was your biggest, your company is very likely to succeed.
2008 – iRobot
I have ordered a few Roomba and Scooba robots from iRobot, for our home and some friends & family – they are excellent cleaning robots, well worth the price in saved “home productivity”. The first two orders worked just fine, but the last one went down the drain when Google Checkout failed to authorize the charge, and triggered a cancellation on iRobot’s systems.
Now having $1000 in a limbo, unavailable and frozen by Google Checkout until August 30th, is very uncomfortable. iRobot support replied to my first email on the issue, stating the order had been cancelled and my card not charged – but the amount was still frozen in pre-authorization state by Google, and they have to tell Google to cancel for the amount to be released. My various follow-up emails on the subject went completely ignored. I even got a reply in the meantime to a different question regarding the shipment of an earlier order!
Finally, I decided to try the trick once more, and fired of an email to Colin Angle, explaining the problem. Within a few minutes, he has replied, assuring me they will find out what happened, and explaining that I won’t get an answer until Tuesday as it’s a long weekend and support will be on holiday – which I understand – “it’s physics!”. Let’s see what happens, but so far, the level of commitment Colin has shown to his company speaks for itself – kudos!.
Filed in the Tech Category:
Unless they -really- get their act together. Point in case – I have ordered two Roombas plus accessories from iRobot, and my credit card has $1000 in a limbo between August 22nd and August 30th. I have no idea if the card charge will eventually go through, as it’s in what is called an authorized state. The money has not left my account, but the bank is holding the charge out of my balance in case the merchant (in this case Google Checkout) finally captures the payment.
The chain of events has been thus:
This all took place within two hours. After this, iRobot says my order was canceled, and no charges have been made (they don’t charge until they ship). Google Checkout, however, says the vendor has received the order, and my card WILL be charged. So far, my bank has only told me that the charge is in the authorization state, it has not been captured, and the limit date until an automatic rollback is done is August 30th.
What does all this have to do with PayPal? Basically, that Google Checkout, in its current state, will never beat PayPal. These are my main gripes:
There are plenty of comments, right from when Checkout was launched until today, about the system’s shortcomings. Google needs to get their act together, or risk losing merchants and customers.
Filed in the Tech Category:
We use Pingdom at Whisher to keep tabs on our servers. This service, albeit not as comprehensive as Nagios, can send TCP and UDP probes, and even check the expected output of a HTTP GET. In case one of the sensors fails, you receive an email and/or SMS telling you about the problem. What is great about Pingdom is that through a very simple interface, you can setup basic monitors for your servers, with graphs and reports on downtime – very good value for money.
Today we had a problem in the switch, which caused it to somehow erase the mapping table entry between one of the server ports and the upstream provider’s gateway, thus effectively blackholing it off the internet. The rest of the servers were working, and pings were fine between all of them, so I rebooted the affected server. The reset on the switch’s port seemed to cure the problem.
Initially, I was alerted to this by an email sent by Pingdom. After the reboot and switch soft reset, Pingdom sent me another email reporting the server as being up again. This is where things went funny:
One hour and sixty-three minutes of downtime? Wouldn’t that add up to two hours and three minutes? Weird maths! It’s also curious that the down alert was received at 20:50:37, meaning the server was really down for only 1h 3m.
Today, just after lunchtime, a Spanair MD-84 crashed on take-off, apparently after an engine failure. The aircraft had already aborted one take-off attempt, and returned for an inspection, which cleared it for flight. So far the official count is 147 dead, with the aircraft broken in half and being completely destroyed. The large fire that ensued caused Madrid Barajas (LEMA) to close for an hour and a fifteen minutes, resulting in over 200 canceled flights.
Being a pilot and aeronautical engineer, and such a disaster so close to home, makes me feel deeply saddened. Thoughts and prayers with all the families of those affected.
Filed in the Tech Category:
TechCrunch reported that SMS updates are gone in the UK, as this email from Biz Stone also confirms:
I’ll start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no
longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number. If you enjoy
receiving updates from Twitter via +44 762 480 1423, we are
recommending that you explore some suggested alternatives.
He goes on to state:
Before I go into more detail, here’s a bit of good news: Twitter
will be introducing several new, local SMS numbers in countries
throughout Europe in the coming weeks and months. These new
numbers will make Twittering more accessible for you if you’ve
been using SMS to send long-distance updates from outside the UK.
Reactions on TechCrunch UK have been more harsh. What gives? For years any company has been able to get the same short-form (4 or 5 digits) number to receive SMS messages from users in many countries at once, so the first thing Twitter did wrong was to use a UK number to send and receive updates, rather than getting local numbers in its countries of maximum usage. These short-form numbers can be assigned a cost per message that is passed onto the user sending them, so you can charge them anything from the standard 15 Euro cents to over 1 Euro – one step to recoup losses.
The way SMS gateways operate is very simple (see Clickatell for an example). When you open an account with them, they will assing you a short number and a prefix of choice – say 5555 and TWIT. They have this short number assigned by all the mobile operators in the country of operation, so it doesn’t matter what the user’s operator is – they just need to remember the single number and prefix. To send an SMS, a user would type TWIT followed by a dot or a space, and the text. This SMS is received by the network operator, which forwards it to the gateway provider as it recognizes the number to which the message was sent. The gateway operator in turn identifies the prefix, and routes the SMS to your servers. The routing is usually done over a HTTP GET to a script on your web server.
If you have deeper pockets, you can get a number assigned exclusively to you, so you don’t even need prefixes (unless you want to setup your own commands or sub-services).
The second thing Twitter has done wrong is to allow an infinite number of SMS messages to be sent out as updates. As soon as they saw traction, it was the time to introduce the “Premium Account”. A ‘free’ user would get say 10 test SMS updates, after which he’d need to upgrade. A premium user would then get 100 SMS per month, and options to purchase extra SMS packages with discounts on volume. This would easily discern those that really need SMS updates from those who can make do with desktop clients or the web.
It may not be too late to introduce these changes, and they seem to be taking place (at least the local access numbers), but I feel Twitter’s reputation is being damaged by the increased feeling of instability.
Filed in the Tech Category:
It’s with surprise that I read a post on The Register and another on TUAW regarding the iPhone 3G’s speed, or lack thereof. The way 3G networks operate has some fundamental differences compared to GPRS or EDGE, the so-called 2G or 2.5G networks. A word of caution before you proceed, if you are a tech purist – I am explaining this in the simplest terms I can find, so don’t be offended by over-simplification.
“Scotty, we’ll need everything you’ve got.” [1]
Let me bore you with a primer on the “old” technology. In the very old days, packet data didn’t exist on GSM cellular networks. Each GSM frequency (also known as physical channel) would be split into eight full-rate (remeber the old EFR hacks?) timeslots, or sixteen half-rate. Voice was digitized using a vocoder, and transmitted to the cell tower using one of the timeslots. The tower then passed it along the switching network, to be terminated at another GSM terminal, or sent out to the PSTN where it could also be converted back to analog for further relay to landline phones. SMS would be sent over the control channel, thus not taking up timeslots for voice calls.
When data was first introduced to GSM, it was in the form of circuit-switched calls, the equivalent to the analog modems used in the early internet days. Since this was the equivalent of dialing a landline modem, the network could only provide one timeslot, and a brute rate of 9.6kbps (yeah, imagine the iPhone running on that!).
Then came GPRS, which brought packet-data to the phone, allowing the adjoining of several timeslots into one single packet-switched call, theoretically giving rates of 56 to 114kbps, which in reality could be as low as 9.6kbps, as cell operators would prioritize voice calls over data. The same occupation time of a timeslot on voice could earn the operator up to 10 times more than the same slot used for data. Thus, in the days when cell density was very low, and voice capability scarce, it was not uncommon to find that a tower would have only one timeslot reserved for GPRS and the rest for voice, sending you back to switched-call speeds.
I am the EDGE! [2]
When new modulation schemes and tighter timing capabilities made it possible, GPRS was upgraded to EDGE, which is an acronym for Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution. The theoretical maximum speed a packet-switched connection could now achieve was raised to 236.8kbps, with an upload speed of 59.2kbps. The upload and download speeds can be balanced to give a more symmetric connection, but this is rarely used.
Remember that we are still talking about chopping up a finite resource, a radio frequency channel, into smaller chunks, each of which can now carry data at increasing speeds, and also be aggregated to boost the overall transfer rate.
Slow? Twelve minutes? Hannibal, I had to say hello! [3]
One day in some lab, a fool invented CDMA. Well, not a fool, a very clever individual – just that the use of CDMA has been taken out of its initial expectations.
CDMA stands for Code Division Multiple Access. Contrary to GSM which uses TDMA, or Time Division Multiple Access, and divides the spectrum into timed slots for use by one mobile station at a time, CDMA allows ALL stations to talk to to the tower at once, with each given an individual code that is embedded in all transmissions. Then, using this code, the tower and terminal can tell who’s traffic it is amidst all the noise.
OK, it’s hard to imagine – let’s try a practical example. Imagine a room full of people, all talking at once to a host. The host gives each member of the public a phrase book in a different language, which they must use to translate what they want to say to the host. The host can then attempt to figure out who is saying what by figuring out the language of each utterance, and translating it back to the original. Sounds complex? You bet! The size of the room was also increased, whereas GSM used 200kHz of spectrum for its eight timeslots, 3G/UMTS using CDMA uses 5MHz, 25 times more spectrum, to achieve a theoretical maximum 14Mbps throughput. In practice, 3G HSDPA has only been able to achieve 7.2Mbps download so far, with HSUPA trying to improve the upload speed.
Before going further, if we compare the transfer speeds of each technology, EDGE can receive 1.18 kb/kHz, compared to 1.44 kb/kHz for HSDPA. Nothing to write home about, considering the huge costs this technology is having, I would say!
Stop it already, tell me what’s wrong with my iPhone!
What is basically wrong is that you have a beautiful screen on a beautiful mobile phone, capable of rendering full-size web pages…but you are sharing your internet connection with all your neighbors. In essence, 3G is allowing everyone to take a piece of the spectrum and use it to send and receive voice and data. This means a single 3G tower can handle a huge ammount of voice traffic, as it uses fewer resources, but when data is also added, it can be strongly degraded. I would venture that operators still prioritize voice over data on their 3G networks.
The key issue to remember is that the download rate is “per tower”, not per user. So, if two users using HSDPA are on the same tower, they will each get a maximum throughput of 3.6Mbps. Divide even further, and the more users you have the worse experience everyone gets. Further add tons of voice calls into the mix, and you have what The Register and TUAW describe in their posts – frustration. The blame may be at the iPhone’s radio, but from what I have been experiencing in Spain, Telefonica’s GPRS network provides almost as good speed as 3G in the very busy Barcelona. Why? Because my GPRS connection is getting better, as more voice traffic is dumped on the 3G networks, and I have more slots to myself!
Filed in the Fire Category:It seems that car manufacturers are putting more and more barriers in their designs, but not against injury – but against DIY-type owners who may want to do a little self-maintenance. Point in case, the VW Touareg, a five-seat SUV, which I had the chance to see involved in a MVA two days ago. This is how the vehicle ended up, with the occupants sustaining minor injuries (click on the image for the photostream of the run):
When we found the battery in order to disconnect the positive, we found this plate over it, held down by a very tight, I would call it “male” Torx screw:
A forum post led me to this part drawing for a Mini, and also to a manufacturer of female Torx sockets. Nobody on our crew carried a driver bit for this thing, so we ended up forcing open the whole plate. It seems very lame for manufacturers to try and stop users from replacing their batteries, at the same hampering the efforts of rescue crews attending MVAs.
It seems Apple is tripping over itself with every update they push. I installed 2.0.1, even though there are reports of problems, on my Telefonica Movistar 16GB iPhone 3G a few minutes ago. After the update, the iPhone shows a red dot on the Phone button, as if there was voicemail waiting, but with no number inside it:
Next, iTunes reports that an update to my carrier’s network settings is available, and wether I want to install it. I say “yes”, and greeted I am by an error:
Is it me, or is Apple failing to push out quality stuff?
I’m pretty happy I didn’t use MobileMe (since I was already a subscriber of .Mac) to keep my contacts, calendar and email in sync, and rather chose mail2web’s hosted Exchange option. With Exchange, my contacts are synched from Entourage to my iPhone and other Macs instantly, and so does my email, calendar and invitations to events. It has a rock-solid feel that right now MobileMe cannot seem to provide. I’m sure Apple is working hard on their own version of ActiveSync for OS X Server, which I’m also sure will work wonders, but right now, if you want Blackberry-like experience on your iPhone, go for Exchange (hosted or otherwise). The motto should have been “Exchange for some of the rest of us and only sometimes”.